Colleges and universities taking Trump cuts

Posted on February 23, 2025 by Bryan Alexander

It’s been one month of the second Trump administration and the impacts on higher education have been arriving at scale.

Today I want to draw attention to real damage done to academic institutions, both directly caused by the new government as well as by institutions themselves in response to Trump actions.

I’m going to try assembling as much evidence as possible in this post – not speculation, nor possibilities, but cases of adverse effects felt in the academic world.  If I missed something, please share in comments or, if you feel uncomfortable doing to in public, by contacting me privately.

It may be useful to follow up by creating an open, crowdsourced spreadsheet like we did for campuses going online because of COVID in 2020.  Let me know what you think in comments.

At the federal level

Most of the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) unit, a research team that’s part of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), have been laid off.  Nearly $1 billion in IES research contracts has been cut.  More than $330 million was cut from the Center’s Regional Educational Laboratories and Equity Assistance Centers.

At least thousands of students have seen internships with the federal government vanish, or at least become unclear if they will happen, due to cuts.

Academic institutions taking hits

The University of Pennsylvania told graduate programs to cut back admissions for fall classes, even to rescinding acceptances already sent out.  One department “which submitted its choices for admits to its graduate program on Feb. 14 — will be forced to rescind the acceptances of 10 of the 17 students.”  The reason: Trump’s cuts to research funds.

University of Pennsylvania first student union_chenyuming on Flickr

Along similar lines, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), expecting federal losses of $100 million or more, suspended non-faculty hiring.

The University of Louisville has ordered a hiring freeze, apparently across the board, until summer.  The Trump administration’s actions against research funding are the cause.

North Carolina State University is going to implement a total hiring freeze.

Columbia University’s medical school announced a hiring freeze.

The administration cut people working at two tribal institutions, Haskell Indian Nations University and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, both operated (unusually) by the federal government’s Bureau of Indian Education.

At Haskell Indian Nations University, about 40 people have already lost their jobs across campus departments, out of about 160 employees, according to a Monday letter from the Haskell Board of Regents to the U.S. Department of the Interior. The board urged in the letter that the university be exempt from the staff cuts. The Lawrence Times reported that the institution has had to postpone or cancel some campus events. Meanwhile, roughly 20 employees were laid off at Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute, out of a staff of about 100, according to Indian Country News.

Northwestern University announced a 10% cut to non-personnel expenses. In that official statement the administration cited the NIH changes as well as a proposed endowment tax hike.

Louisiana State University removed law professor Ken Levy from teaching duties after he criticized Trump and the state’s governor. He sued and there have been multiple court rulings since.  Note that this is a tenured prof with an endowed chair.

Millsaps College fired a tenured professor outright after he criticized the United States following the November election.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) cuts

Various effects, have followed Trump’s moves against DEI, notably the anti-DEI “Dear colleague” letter.  The new administration put some Department of Education staff on leave for attending a DEI training.  It cut $600 million in DEI-related campus grants; we should expect multiple program and personnel cuts to follow.

The Department of Defense ordered an end to race-based admissions at the nation’s military academies.

Boston University shut down its Center for Antiracist Research; its founding director, Ibram X. Kendi, left for Howard University.  Missouri State University terminated its DEI programs as well as its office for inclusive engagement.  West Virginia University shut down its DEI office.

Curricular cuts have occurred. The United States Naval Academy, for example, removed all materials “that promote ‘critical race theory,’ ‘gender ideology’ and other topics targeted by the Trump administration.” The University of North Carolina system ordered the removal of DEI class work from general education requirements.

Some campuses have altered or deleted public-facing content. The University of Pennsylvania removed DEI content from its website.

West Point shut down affinity clubs based on race and gender.

At least two accreditors, the American Bar Association and the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET), have dropped DEI language from their institutional assessment processes.

Rutgers University-New Brunswick canceled an event, the “HBCUs and Registered Apprenticeship Mini-Conference.”

In terms of gender identity, the Department of Education removed nonbinary as a gender option from the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid).  New Title IX guidance states that the government will no longer protect or recognize trans students.

The department launched investigations into two universities, San Jose State University and the University of Pennsylvania, as well as the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, for violations under this new Title IX interpretation.

The NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) banned transgender students from playing with women’s teams for competition, but allowed them to practice.

At the state level, following or inspired by Trump

There are also stories of Trump-influenced or -inspired actions at the state level against universities.  Two members of Congress asked three of their state’s institutions to cut ties with China:

U.S. representatives John Moolenar and Tim Walberg wrote letters to the presidents of Eastern Michigan University, Oakland University and the University of Detroit Mercy demanding that they cancel their partnerships with institutions in China, expressing concerns that sensitive research could help the Chinese military advance its technological capabilities.

One, Oakland University, promptly did so. (archived)

Ohio’s senate approved, and its other house now considers, a law which would take multiple actions against higher education.  The “Enact Advance Ohio Higher Education Act”

seeks to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, change the way universities can instruct and endorse certain topics the state deems controversial, decrease term limits for state school board of trustees, create a mandatory American civics course for students and prohibit faculty from striking, among other things.

I have to stop there for now. As I said above, please add any corrections or more stories in comments below. Reach out to me privately if you prefer. And let me know if I should fire up a crowdsourced spreadsheet for this evidence.

(thanks to Tom Stroup and other friends; Penn photo by chenyuming)

Posted in horizon scanning, politics | 5 Comments

This week the Future Trends Forum turns nine years old

Posted on February 12, 2025 by Bryan Alexander

Greetings from weirdly snowy northern Virginia.  There are many things going on right now for this blog’s topic – that weird enrollment bounce, DOGE going after the Department of Education, a swarm of AI issues, some good and bad climate news – but today is one I set aside to celebrate an anniversary.

Well, partly the anniversary of my birth.  I turned 58 this week and will hopefully post on it. But the bigger deal is that the Future Trends Forum just turned nine years old.

Yes, we launched the program waaaaaaay back in 2016.  On February 11th, 2016, we held the first Forum session.  The guest was the excellent Audrey Watters and the topic concerned critical approaches to educational technology.  Several dozen people joined us.

The idea was to hold conversations about higher education’s future.  No formal presentations, no PowerPoint slides, no scripted interviews.  Instead we wanted to make a space for open, free-wheeling, and organic discussion.  The audience would play the central role, driving the show with people’s comments and questions.

Future Trends Forum first episode

Since then… I think it’s fair to say it’s been a success. The Forum has taken place almost every single week for nine years, well supported by the fine Shindig platform.  We have hosted literally hundreds of conversations covering a huge range of topics, from educational technology to presidential leadership, AI, COVID, antiracism, teaching, libraries, demographics, and copyright.  I have hosted sessions from across the United States and in multiple other countries. So many creators have joined us: writers, video makers, technology developers, founders.

I can share some stats.  The YouTube channel now has 432 recordings.  Our email list, which people can and do opt out of, now has over 9,100 members.  Audience persistence (the proportion of people who stay for the entire program) is over 90%.

On the qualitative side, though, I think is the real achievement. There are. sadly, a lot of sad or even terrible webinars out there. The COVID era made us more familiar with them and perhaps improved the quality of some, but the poor webinar problem persists.  The Forum has offered a different idea, extensively grounded in practice, of a live video experience which is actually interactive, where audience participation is the key. Guest after guest has told me how refreshing the experience was for them, how much they enjoyed the give and take of diverse questions and the organic flow of discussion.

We’ve also experimented with the form pretty consistently. We’ve tried out some things which worked, and became part of the Forum, and some things which didn’t. We’ve had mingle sessions, community meetings without guests, scenario exercises, and tutorials.  We’ve done in-person shows, combining the virtual audience with one of live human being in the same room.  Some sessions had a series of guests in a row, while others worked like panels.  Those experiments continue.

It’s a cliche now to use the word “community” to mean “any group of people without regard to their cohesion or actual identity,” but I think the Forum has developed into a serious community. In any given session you’ll see friends greet each other with cheer and familiarity, exchanging puns and long-running jokes, referencing ideas from prior sessions. People exchange professional news, too; some folks have gotten jobs, publishing gigs, and more through the Forum community. It’s been a delight to see, and to help, so many people develop and grow.

I want to express my thanks for additional people who made the Forum succeed.  Shindig’s founding CEO, Steve Gottlieb, has been a great supporter, interlocutor, and friend.  Hard-working Shindig staff helped a great deal, too, especially in the first few years.  Wesson Radomsky has done fine work in helping produce each episode.  Patreon supporters have helped us sustain the Forum financially and intellectually. Many schools, offices, governments, nonprofits, libraries, and friends have hosted me on some Thursday afternoons.

And there’s the Forum community.  So many of you have set aside an hour each Thursday to join us, to think together, to pose deep questions, and to share your ideas. So many have helped the Forum in a variety of ways: suggesting guests, coming up with format ideas, joining us in person. I can’t tell you how sweet it is to have a total stranger come up to me, grinning, saying how much they enjoy the Future Trends Forum.

Looking ahead, I have some ideas for how to take things forward to our tenth (!) year. I’d like to set up a store where people can buy books written by guests and some merchandise (I’d appreciate any advice on this, friends).  I’d love to bring the Forum to the other side of the world, time-zone wise, setting up a program centered in Asia (I’m open to collaborators). I’d also like to add some more technological features, from live transcription to a virtual/extended reality version.  And more.

I’ll close here.  Thank you all for your support.  The Future Trends Forum, like Soylent Green, is made of people – but for people.  I’m proud of how we’ve added to the conversations around higher education and offered a better way of doing webinars.

Here’s to next year, our first decade – and the next!

(photo by Will)

Posted in Future Trends Forum | 3 Comments

Campus closures, mergers, cuts, and crises at the start of 2025

Posted on February 10, 2025 by Bryan Alexander

How are colleges and universities responding to financial pressures?

Today, while Trump continues to flood the zone, I want to establish a sense of what the higher education baseline was before he cut loose.   As the new administration goes even more energetically after academia I’d like to share some data about our sector’s standing.

Last year I tracked cuts and crises afflicting dozens of campuses.  I posted roughly every months, noting program cuts, institutional mergers, and campus closures, as well as financial crises likely to cause same:  March 1, March 20, March 28, April, May, June, July, September, November.   Today I’ll continue that line for the reasons I’ve previously given: to document key stories in higher education; to witness human suffering; to point to possible directions for academia to take.  In addition, I want to help paint a picture of the world Trump is starting to attack.

Some caveats: I’m doing this in haste, between the political chaos and a stack of professional deadlines, which means the following will be more telegraphic than usual.  I may well have missed some stories, so please let me know in comments.

1 Closing colleges and universities

Philadelphia’s University of the Arts closed in 2024. Now different actors are angling for its physical remains.  Temple University purchased an iconic building, Quadro Bay bought another, and while more bids appear.

2 Mergers

Gannon University (Catholic, Pennsylvania) and Ursuline College (Catholic, Ohio) agreed to merge by this December.  The idea is to synthesize complementary academic offers and provide institutional stability, it seems.

Seattle University by martinvirtualtours

Seattle University (Jesuit, Washington state) and the Cornish College of the Arts (private, Washington) also agreed to merge.  As with the Lake Erie schools, one motivation is to expand curricular offerings:

Emily Parkhust, Cornish’s interim president, said the deal opens new doors for the tiny school’s nearly 500 students.

“This strategic combination will allow our students opportunities that we simply weren’t able to offer and provide at a small arts college,” she said. “Such as the opportunity to take business classes, computer courses, pursue master’s degree programs, engage in college sports — and even swim in a pool.”

Financial problems also played a role: “Cornish declared it was undergoing a financial emergency in 2020, and this year, Seattle University paused hiring as it faces a $7.5 million deficit.”

The Universidad Andres Bello (Universidad Andrés Bello; private, Chile) purchased Post University (for-profit, Connecticut).

3 Campuses cutting programs and jobs

In this series I’ve largely focused on the United States for the usual reasons: the sheer size and complexity of the sector; limited time. But in my other writing I’ve noted the epochal crisis hitting Canadian higher education, as the nation’s decision to cut international enrollment has struck institutional finances.   Tony Bates offers a good backgrounder.  Alex Usher’s team set up an excellent website tracking the resulting retrenchment.

British higher education is also suffering, partly for the reasons that nation’s economy is hurting: negative effects of Brexit, energy problems stemming from the Ukraine war, and political fecklessness. For one example I find the University of Hull (public research) which is combining 17 schools into 11 and ending its chemistry program, all for financial reasons. Cardiff University (Prifysgol Caerdydd; public research) cut 400 full time jobs, also for financial reasons:

Vice-Chancellor Professor Wendy Larner defended the decision to cut jobs, saying the university would have become “untenable” without drastic reforms.

The job role cuts are only a proposal, she said, but insisted the university needed to “take difficult decisions” due to the declining international student applications and increasing cost pressures.

Prof Larner said the university is not alone in its financial struggles, with most UK universities grappling with the “broken” funding system.

Back in the United States, Sonoma State University (public university, part of California State University system) announced a massive series of cuts.

“approximately 46 university faculty – both tenured and adjunct – will receive notice that their contracts will not be renewed for 2025-26. Additional lecturers will receive notice that no work will be available in fall 2025… Four management positions and 12 staff positions also will be eliminated.”

The university will shut down a group of departments: “Art History, Economics; Geology; Philosophy; Theater and Dance; and Women and Gender Studies.”

(These are the kind of cuts I’ve referred to as “queen sacrifices,” desperate moves to cut a school’s way to survival.  The term comes from chess, where a player can give up their most powerful piece, the queen. In my analogy tenured faculty represent that level of relative power.)

There will be some consolidation (“The college also plans to merge the Ethnic Studies departments (American Multicultural Studies, Chicano and Latino Studies, and Native American Studies) into one department with one major”) along with ending a raft of programs:

Administrative Services Credential in ELSE; Art History BA; Art Studio BFA; Dance BA; Earth and Environmental Sciences BA; Economics BA; Education Leadership MA; English MA; French BA; Geology BS; German Minor; Global Studies BA; History MA; Interdisciplinary Studies BA; Interdisciplinary Studies MA; Philosophy BA; Physical Science BA; Physics BA; Physics BS; Public Administration MPA; Spanish MA; Theatre Arts BA; Women and Gender Studies BA.

Additionally, and unusually, SSU is also ending student athletics: “The University will be removing NCAA Division II athletics entirely, involving some 11 teams in total.”

What lies behind these cuts?  My readers will not be surprised to learn that enrollment decline plays a role, but might be shocked by the decline’s size: “SSU has experienced a 38% decrease in enrollment.”

More cuts: St. Norbert College (Catholic, liberal arts, Wisconsin) is planning to cut faculty and its theology department. (I posted about an earlier round of cuts there  in 2024.)  Columbia College Chicago (private, arts) will terminate faculty and academic programs.  Portland State University (Oregon) ended contracts for a group of non-tenure-track faculty.

The University of New Orleans (public research) will cut $2.2 million of administration and staff.

The University of Connecticut (public, land grant) is working on closing roughly two dozen academic programs.  According to one account, they include:

master’s degrees in international studies, medieval studies, survey research and educational technology; graduate certificates in adult learning, literacy supports, digital media and design, dementia care, life story practice, addiction science and survey research; a sixth-year certificate in educational technology, and a doctoral degree in medieval studies.

It’s not clear if those terminations will lead to faculty and staff reductions.

4 Budget crises, programs cut, not laying off people yet

There are also stories of campuses facing financial pressures which haven’t resulted in cuts, mergers, or closures so far, but could lead to those. Saint Augustine’s University (historically black, North Carolina) is struggling to get approval for a campus leasing deal, while moving classes online “to take care of deferred maintenance issues.”  SAU has been facing controversies and financial challenges for nearly a generation.

The president of another HBCU, Tennessee State University, stated that they would run out of money by this spring.  That Higher Ed Dive article notes:

TSU’s financial troubles are steep and immediate. An FAQ page on the university’s website acknowledges that the financial condition has reached crisis levels stemming from missed enrollment targets and operating deficits. This fall, the university posted a projected deficit of $46 million by the end of the fiscal year.

The Middle States Commission on Higher Education agreed to hear an accreditation appeal from Keystone College (private, Pennsylvania), while that campus struggles:

Keystone college front page 2025 Feb

From the top of Keystone’s web page right now.

The board of William Jewell University (private liberal arts, Missouri) declared financial exigency.  This gives them emergency powers to act. As the official statement put it, the move “enables reallocation of resources, restructuring of academic programs and scholarships and significant reductions in force.”

Brown University (private research university, Rhode Island) is grappling with a $46 million deficit “that would grow to more than $90 million,” according to provost Francis J. Doyle III and Executive Vice President for Finance and Administration Sarah Latham.  No cuts are in the offing, although restraining growth is the order of the day. In addition, there’s a plan to increase one sort of program for revenue:

the university will work to “continue to grow master’s [program] revenue, ultimately doubling the number of residential master’s students and increasing online learners to 2,000 in five years.”

KQED reports that other California State University campuses are facing financial stresses, notably Cal State East Bay and San Francisco State University.  The entire CSU system and the University of California system each face massive cuts from the state’s governor.

Reflections

Nearly all of this is occurring before the second Trump administration began its work. Clearly parts of the American post-secondary ecosystem are suffering financially and in terms of enrollment.

It’s important to bear in mind that each school’s trajectory is distinct from the others in key ways. Each has its history, its conditions, its competing strategies, resources, micropolitics, and so on. Each one deserves more exploration than I have time for in this post.

At the same time I think we can make the case that broader national trends are also at work. Operating costs rise for a clutch of reasons (consumer inflation, American health care’s shambles, deferred maintenance being a popular practice, some high compensation practices, etc) and push hard on some budgets. Enrollment continues to be a challenge (I will return to this topic in a future post). The Trump administration does not seem likely to ameliorate those concerns.

Note, too, that many of the institutions I’ve touched on here are not first tier campuses. The existence of some may be news to some readers. As a result, they tend not to get much media attention nor to attract resources.   It is important, though, to point them out if we want to think beyond academia’s deep hierarchical structures.

Last note: this post has focused on statistics and bureaucracy, but these are all stories about real human beings.  The lives of students, faculty, staff and those in surrounding communities are all impacted.  Don’t lose sight of that fact or of these people.

(Seattle University photo by Michael & Sherry Martin; thanks to Karen B on Bluesky, Karen Bellnier otherwise, Mo Pelzel, Peter Shea, and Siva Vaidhyanathan for links; thanks to IHE for doing a solid job of covering these stories)

Posted in horizon scanning | Tagged | 5 Comments

Where do the NSF and NIH attacks hit hardest?

Posted on February 1, 2025 by Bryan Alexander

A quick post today, pointing to one aspect of the new Trump administration’s moves against higher education. New executive orders rained down and struck two major federal research funding, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes for Health (NIH), as I summarized two days ago.  Spending was frozen, then maybe un-frozen, and now much is uncertain.

I was curious about where these NSF and NIH problems fell most heavily across the country, and Axios did a good job helping us visualize that question:

NIH and NSF funding by state, from Axios

NIH and NSF funding by state, from Axios

Notice the heavy NIH/NSF draw in Maryland and Massachusetts.  There’s some recent and interesting research on uneven NIH spending.

Politically minded readers might see the strong federal research presence along the west coast, upper midwest, and northeast, then think of the 2024 election map (New York Times version):

2024 election results by state NYTimes

It’s not a 1:1 correspondence – note North Carolina’s strong NIH/NSF presence, which Axios addressed in a separate note – but the general pattern does echo.  We could think of this as a red state coalition punishing blue states, as they’ve done before, or as a sign of the growing role of education as a marker of party difference.

It seems reasonable to expect more of this over the next year.

Posted in politics | Leave a comment

The new Trump administration hits higher education

Posted on January 30, 2025 by Bryan Alexander

(Greetings from airportland.  Today I’ve been in New York’s JFK airport for nine hours and counting, with flights delayed due to the awful Potomac River crash.  Apologies if this post is telegraphic or hasty.)

Donald Trump is back in office with an intense flurry of executive actions and statements. In that whirlwind he and his team have found time to take some steps against concerning higher education, which I’ll try to summarize here.

First off: if any of these policies impact you in your academic work, please share your story in comments, if you can. If you’d like to, but don’t want to do so in public, you can reach me privately here.  We need to get these stories out to show the real, human damage Trump is doing to academia.

Second, please note this is a post made in haste.  Political events are moving very quickly. Personally, the past two weeks have been grueling. If this post missed anything, please let me know in comments.  This is also a post focused just on higher education impacts; I don’t have time for a summary or analysis of the overall administrative strategy.  Similarly I can’t offer advice about what to do about all of this.

Trump 2 presidential actions header

ITEM – some federal web content has gone down or been replaced by new materials. This has removed some data and documents from researchers’ use.

ITEM – an executive order ending DEI language and practice in the federal government includes this plan to go after a handful of wealthy campuses: “each [federal] agency shall identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations of… institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars.”  In other words, the feds will target some universities with lavish endowments to, ah, check on their DEI work.

ITEM – an executive order against antisemitism includes many points about colleges and universities.  They include working with campuses to possibly deport “aliens” who teach (alleged) antisemitism as well as preparing for future Attorney General actions against campuses.

ITEM – the new administration tried to suspend the operation of a lot of federal grants and loans. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) memo M-25-13 called for a pause in many payments:

To implement these orders, each agency must complete a comprehensive analysis of all of their Federal financial assistance programs to identify programs, projects, and activities that may be implicated by any of the President’s executive orders. In the interim, to the extent permissible under applicable law, Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal. [bold and odd capitalizations in original]

Some of those grants currently go to academic activities.  In response, the National Science Foundation (NSF) told grant recipients to not spend any grand monies while they “are working expeditiously to conduct a comprehensive review of our projects, programs and activities to be compliant with the existing executive orders.”  The National Institutes for Health (NIH) suspended staff travel for the moment, travel which is key to holding meetings for grant decisions.  NIH also canceled meetings straight up.

The threat poses by this order to academic research and other programs is substantial.  President Mitchell of the American Council on Education (ACE) stated that “this unprecedented order to pause grants, loans, and other direct federal support is causing great harm to millions of Americans, as well as our nation’s overall economy and security. This is bad public policy…”  On a podcast Mitchell referred to the policy as “institutional destruction.”

With a day the pause was itself temporarily paused by a federal judge.  The OMB then fired back with a clarification memo, within which we find assurances that the pause wouldn’t hit student loans.  Instead, the policy was “expressly limited to programs, projects, and activities implicated by the President’s Executive Orders, such as ending DEI, the green new deal, and funding nongovernmental organizations that undermine the national interest.”   At around the same time the new press secretary offered her view on X/Twitter:

This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze. It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo. Why? To end any confusion created by the court’s injunction. The President’s EO’s on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented.

Many scholarly societies and universities have issued comments, mostly of the “we’re watching closely” variety (for example).  The Department of Education seems to be starting to review some of its programs, according to Inside Higher Ed:

At the Education Department, programs subject to review include TRIO, Pell Grants, student loans and grants for childcare on campus, as well as those that support students with disabilities and minority-serving institutions. Currently, neither the $229 million fund for Hispanic-serving institutions nor the $400 million grant program for historically Black colleges and universities is included in the review.

As part of the review, agencies will have to answer a series of questions for each program, including whether the programs fund DEI, support “illegal aliens” or promote “gender ideology.”

So it seems now that the administration is conducting, or is about to start, some review of some of its grants to academics.  This immediately has a chilling effect on plans, research, teaching, and other academic work. And some of that work just stopped.

ITEM – an executive order ended a suite of Biden administration executive orders, including a group dealing with higher education, such as:

Executive Order 14021 of March 8, 2021 (Guaranteeing an Educational Environment Free From Discrimination on the Basis of Sex, Including Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity).

Executive Order 14045 of September 13, 2021 (White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Hispanics).

Executive Order 14049 of October 11, 2021 (White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Native Americans and Strengthening Tribal Colleges and Universities).

Executive Order 14050 of October 19, 2021 (White House Initiative on Advancing Educational Equity, Excellence, and Economic Opportunity for Black Americans).

Executive Order 14084 of September 30, 2022 (Promoting the Arts, the Humanities, and Museum and Library Services).

These are varied, but the reader can glimpse the impacts: reducing federal support for museums, tribal institutions, black people, Hispanics, women, gender nonconforming folks, and more who are students, faculty, or staff.

ITEM – the order proclaiming the existence of only two genders can impact nonbinary and gender fluid students, faculty, and staff by ending federal programs which supported them and by changing their identity documents.

ITEM – another order announced an impending “Ending Indoctrination Strategy” for K-12 schools.  This entails a review of federal funding (grants), school curriculum, and more.  The target: the teaching of “radical, anti-American ideologies.”  It’s not clear how this might work in higher education, and I’d like to hear from people in education programs.

Beyond these statements and policies directly impacting higher ed are other orders which may have indirect effects:

The orders tightening border controls and launching mass deportations (for example) can impact undocumented students.

That executive order against DEI in the federal workforce – this includes ending federal promotion of diversity and ending DEI language in grant documentation.

This order ending many Biden orders may hit federal climate programs, which side effects for academics relying on them.

That’s where I’m stopping for now.  Looking back on this post, it seems to be a lot.  It might be too much to deal with for some folks.  If you’d like more information, the American Council on Education (ACE) has some good resources on what the Trump administration is doing to academia, including this page.

On a personal note, an observation and a question: over the past year I worked to help academics plan for a potential Trump 2.0 administration.  That seemed like a good use of my futurist skills and platform.  Accordingly I wrote a bunch of blog posts (look under this header) and hosted several Future Trends Forum sessions.  We did an open, extended reading of Project 2025. Now Trump is fulfilling many Project 2025 plans and taking other actions we’ve discussed.

Honestly, I’m not sure if what I did last year did any good.  Most readers and participants reported being depressed and resigned. Now, I’m not sure what I should do as the warned event has begun.  I’ve had people tell me privately that I shouldn’t do anything publicly, either because it might lead to attacks on my family or because I might platform those the speakers found to be dangerous.  Do posts like this one help anyone?

My work on climate change… continues, even though it’s now become a lot harder. I plan to keep doing that, addressing what Trump means for academic climate work.

Over to you. What would you like this higher ed futurist to do? I’m open to suggestions.

Above all, I wish you all the best, my academic family. Please take care and be safe.

 

 

Posted in politics | 8 Comments

Notes on the Los Angeles fires, higher education, and climate change

Posted on January 15, 2025 by Bryan Alexander

This month I’ve been working on a post about how the Earth just broke the 1.5 C global heating threshold, as part of my work on climate change and the future of higher education. I hope to publish that soon, but the enormous Los Angeles fires just happened – are still happening, in fact. I’ve been posted about this on social media and talking with reporters, so I wanted to share some observations based on my research.

In this post I’ll start with a look at the present, how this disaster is impacting colleges and universities in terms of climate change.  Next I’ll consider what the event might mean for higher education’s future.  This will be a fast and sketchy post, because the LA event is still developing, and because I’ve already written a lot about the broader topic.

To be clear, this post is not an analysis or summary of the fires per se. There’s plenty of reporting on the fires themselves and the Wikipedia page is, characteristically, quite rich. Instead the focus here is specifically on higher education in the crisis.  Additionally, and it should go without saying, my heart goes out to the hundreds of thousands of people directly impacted.

One more introductory point: I’m not arguing that climate change caused the LA fires.  I’m saying, in line with what I’ve seen from research, that global warming played a role in making these fires the way they are.  Generally, climate change worsens natural disasters like fires, spurring more of them and worsening their intensity.

1 Colleges and universities in the fires right now

As I write this the LA fires still rage, with added danger of high winds.  According to the official California fire website, the Hurst Fire is 97% contained, but the Ventura one is 47%, as the Eaton fire is similarly 45%.   Far worse, the Palisades fire is just 19% contained and has covered 23,713 acres.  Overall 40,660 acres have burned, or around 63.5 square miles.  At least 24 people have died and more than 12,300 structures have been destroyed.

LA fires map official site 2025 January 15

As of January 15, 11:57 am ET.

Where are colleges and universities in this situation?  A quick Google Maps offers one view:

LA fires colleges and universities Google Maps

Google Maps helpfully included fire locations automatically. UCLA is the first red dot east of Palisades.

So we don’t campus universities literally on fire (so far), but this is close. Too close.

How are these institutions hit and what are they doing in response?

Right now I cannot find any accounts of students, staff, or faculty being hurt or killed, for which I am deeply grateful.  I have seen and heard anecdotes about academics forced to evacuate, and some of them have seen property damaged, including homes. People are warning about air quality damage to lungs – i.e., smoke and particulate inhalation – but I haven’t seen estimates of that among academics.

Pepperdine University and UCLA moved classes online this week.  Others closed when the fires broke out:

Santa Monica College, Pasadena City College, Ventura College and Glendale Community College closed their campuses through the rest of the week while California Institute of Technology, Occidental College and others either canceled classes or closed down Wednesday and Thursday.

Thankfully,”[m]ost of the colleges are still on winter break, so many students aren’t on campus.”  And Pasedena reopened.

Academically adjacent, a major public space research enterprise was hit, as summarized by Wikipedia:

On January 7, NASA closed the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in nearby La Cañada Flintridge, California, through at least January 13 due to high winds and the encroaching Eaton Fire, forcing the evacuation of all non-emergency personnel at the site. The operations of the NASA Deep Space Network were relocated from the main facility to an off-site location and all employees were instructed to work from home.  As of January 10, JPL director Laurie Leshin reported there has been minor wind damage and no wildfire damage at the site, but over 150 staff had lost their homes.

There are so many details and stories here.  Inside Higher Ed notes this terrifying problem averted:

At Pepperdine in Malibu, officials made the call to start the spring semester online in part because the gas company shut off the natural gas service to campus after the fires caused a few gas lines to rupture.

The same article sketched one college’s (Pasadena) response:

Volunteers and college staff worked over the weekend to prepare the campus for reopening. That effort included power washing campus spaces and cleaning the air in buildings. The college will have bottled water and masks on hand for faculty, students and staff and will provide free meals to the campus community.

Several years ago I came up with this model for understanding how higher education and climate change can intersect:

How higher education engages with the climate crisis_overall

Let me apply it now.

Obviously the main challenge is to campus grounds, as we’ve seen, and to the population.  But the impacts go beyond that domain.  For example, in terms of community relations, we’re seeing some connections already occurring:  “UCLA and other colleges in the region are providing free meals to the community and housing evacuees. Pierce College in Woodland Hills is serving as a shelter for large animals.”  Are any campuses in the area, or nearby, hosting evacuees?

We can consider the teaching and research domains, and here I have only suppositions and questions, rather than evidence.  Some number of students will experience – are experiencing, have experienced – these fires, and will bring all of that to classes.  How prepared are faculty for handling PTSD?  For those who teach about climate change, and who might want to bring the LA fires into class as a current example, can they honor students’ experiences without retraumatizing them?

The research side shows one problem I’ve been mentioning for a while: climate damage to research materials.

LA fires Andrew McNally House from LA Times

“The Andrew McNally House, built by the co-founder of the Rand McNally publishing company”

More than two dozen historical architectural sites have been lost so far.  A theosophical center burned,

the world’s largest archive of Theosophical materials, including a library with 40.000 titles, the entire archive of the history of the TS, including ca. 10.000 unpublished letters, pertaining to HPB [Helena Blavatsky], the Mahatmas, W.Q. Judge, G.R.S. Mead, Katherine Tingley, and G. de Purucker, membership records since 1875, art objects, and countless other irreplaceable materials. The archives also contained works of Boehme, Gichtel, donations from the king of Siam including rare Buddhist scriptures, and so on.

A music publisher’s building was burned, including a lot of materials for the composer Arnold Schoenberg.

Back to the diagram and its bottom right box: how many affected faculty, staff, and students are taking their stories to the public?  One Jet Propulsion Lab/NASA climate scientist saw his house burned down, then wrote to a major news venue about it.

2 What this might mean for higher education’s future

Let’s pause for a moment to look ahead from this event, to think about what it might suggest for higher education’s future.

As I said earlier, these fires are signs of things to come.  We must expect more and worse such disasters, among many other effects of the climate crisis.  They will vary, of course, depending on location, regional systems, campus operations, and luck.  Each college and university needs to forecast its own exposure to climate-accelerated disasters and plan accordingly.

In terms of an institution’s physical plant – buildings, green spaces, transportation fleet, infrastructure, etc. – this becomes a question of proactive defense and harm reduction. How can we best preserve our campus for the age of climate crisis?  The LA fires point so far to some ideas.  Here’s a detailed look at how some houses survived the storms through their design.  Can you apply any of those elements, including passivhaus architecture, to a campus exposed to potential fire damage?

Consider academia’s research mission.  To what extent are our materials subject to this kind of destruction, or to other climate damages?  How can we best preserve them: hardening sites, digitization, relocation?

Back to teaching and learning. Most campuses learned a lot about emergency remote instruction during COVID; have they applied those lessons, including improving what didn’t go well? As more students experience climate trauma, are we prepared to support them? And what role do current and very recent climate disasters play in our classes?

Shifting domains again, to what extent are campus emergency plans integrated with those of the local community?  In Universities on Fire I wrote about one very fire-exposed institution, some of whose staff trained with local fire services.  Do we support our populations making such volunteer partnerships?  And how many campuses are ready to host evacuees from elsewhere?

One last and troubling point: for several years I’ve been quietly recommending academics reckon with academia’s role in making the climate crisis occur.  It shouldn’t be a surprising point, given how many students we’ve graduated into fields like finance and petroleum engineering, journalism and political science, where they helped worsen the crisis in various degrees.  Or consider rich institutions’ relying on fossil fuel company holdings in their endowments, or how some academic research furthered the CO2 boom. Or the people who sit on college and university boards while also serving on those of greenhouse gas emission leaders.

No, I’m not saying all academics are evil as a result, nor am I rendering invisible the climate action taken by faculty, staff, and students. I’m saying it’s clear that academia played its part in enabling the crisis. I don’t think anyone has held us to account yet, but people may well do so.

Perhaps people like the Campus Climate Network, who recently shared this:
LA fires brought to you by big oil with support from universities - Campus Climate Network

Are we ready to have that conversation?  Can we applied lessons from the recent racial reckoning?  Are campuses ready for this level of critique and outrage?

Back to the present: my thoughts are with the people of Los Angeles, suffering an inferno.  I hope they recover swiftly and that higher education thinks hard about what just happened.

(thanks to bob stein, Karen Costa, and Steven Kaye for links; many thanks to Inside Higher Ed for reporting)

Posted in climatechange | Leave a comment

Redesigning a class for hybrid/hyflex students

Posted on January 12, 2025 by Bryan Alexander

How can we best teach a hybrid or HyFlex class?

This week I’m starting my gaming in education seminar and the students are almost exactly balanced between in person and online.  I’ve taught a series of blended classes in Georgetown’s LDT program before, yet wanted to redesign this one with some new ideas and to share my plans here.

First, some general notes, then I’ll dive into my plans for the seminar.

1 Some things I do when teaching hybrid/Hyflex classes

By “hybrid” or “Hyflex” class I’m talking about the general idea of a physical class where in-person and remote learners jointly participate, especially the synchronous or live sessions.  For this post I’m not interested in litigating terminology, nor in talking about the broader issues of supporting hybrid learning. Today I’m focused on a single, practical implementation case.  (If you want to talk HyFlex, let me recommend our two Future Trends Forum sessions with Brian Beatty: 1, 2)

I’ve taught such classes for years in various contexts and with different technologies.  I think the first time was around 1999 when visiting the University of Umea’s Humlab, where I gave a talk to a mixed audience.  Around half were in person and another half appeared through a virtual world (pre-Second Life!). I still remember the disorienting feeling of beholding the two separate audiences in front of me… then a kind of “click” feeling I’ve developed ideas and practices since then.

My basic principle is to support all students, regardless of modality.  I want everyone to feel welcome, supported, and hailed, both through their connection to me as instructor of record, as well as with each other in a budding learning community. Because online learners can feel at a disadvantage, I try to prioritize them with my attention, tending to give them first dibs on various activities. If in-person and online hands go up, online gets priority. It’s a kind of version of the progressive stack practice, but for remote students rather than those marginalized by other factors.

I use technology in a HyFlex setting to maximize the affordances remote learners work with. Our main workhorse software for synchronous meetings is Zoom, so I encourage online students to be creative with their backgrounds and personal presentation, celebrating them.  To the horror of many webinar hosts I insist on keeping the chat function going and engaging with the remote folks that way, creating a kind of backchannel. I also am ready to fire up Zoom rooms when we do small group work.

In terms of pedagogical practices, I often have to decide if I’m going to link remote and in-person learners for a given exercise, or split them by technologies. Sometimes it works better to have a small group with both populations represented, for example, and other times the digital students do well to work together while their face-to-face peers do their own.  In class writing can cross these streams neatly, as when students write to Canvas discussion threads or Google Docs, all equally at home on those web pages.  I always respond verbally to digital writing, and in this kind of class like to lead with the words written by the online team.

I’m a fan of polling throughout my work, and live classes are no exception.  In my LDT seminars I usually poll informally, since these graduate classes tend to be small (under 20 people; this gaming class looks like around 12). I quickly and verbally ask folks if they’re familiar with a certain thing, or take their attitudinal temperature on another topic. I might have them quickly do a chat waterfall response or a brief whiteboard reaction (voting with dots or stickies, say) if I’m concerned that not all students feel they can speak out loud to the point. Again, in the hybrid environment I’ll prioritize remote learners’ reactions.

In each of my classes I begin the semester by asking them what rules or guidelines they’d like to have in general. With a HyFlex class I want students to build out the rules of the road they’d like to have – especially what the online learners would like to maximize their experience and how the in-person students want to best interact with their digitally represented peers.

Now, all of this quickly becomes meta, because LDT students are there precisely to study digital learning, and that’s great. We can connect our practical decisions to their learning, experience, readings, projects, and aspirations.  I plan to foreground this from the first session and return to the theme throughout the semester.

Hyflex thoughts by Dave Cormier captured by Giulia Forsythe on Flickr

Dave Cormier’s thoughts about teaching Hyflex, captured by Giulia Forsythe on Flickr.

2 How to make a hybrid gaming in education class work

I’m teaching this class in a great room, very large with mobile furniture including rolling tables and whiteboards.  There are three big screens on walls.  Speakers are clear and powerful. Microphones and plentiful.  Bandwidth is solid.  Away from us, remote learners have at least sufficient gear to do the work: computers with audio and video, decent connections. They will Zoom in from various locations, depending on time and their lives: offices, kitchens, airports, cars.

So how do make this work for a class about gaming?  Lectures (always brief) and discussions are taken care of (see above).

Much depends on the kind of game and what’s available.  In some instances, I’m going for what I think of as “1 game, 2 versions.”  That’s when there’s a digital version of the game which is available and easily playable.  For the tabletop game unit we will play classic Eurogame Catan. In-person students will use my cardboard and plastic copy, although one or two might double up (4 players max). At the same time remote students will play the free, online version.  I’d like the latter to play each other, but they might start against the AI.  That way everyone gets a feel for the game.

Similarly, we’ll play a few rounds of The Quiet Year in our introductory class.  This is a map-making game where players represent a community rebuilding after a disaster.  Play takes place on a big sheet of paper.  In the in-person class, I will set out huge rolls of butcher paper, along with multiple pens of various types.  The on-line class will use whiteboard tool Miro, which they’re already familiar with, to draw, sketch, and write. Random events drive the game, which appear in the form of physical cards for the face-to-face crowd.  Online students will randomly pick events from a shared pdf.  1 game, 2 versions. 

In contrast, when we play digital games, everyone can play on an equal footing.  Each student can fire up Seedship or Waterworks from their browser and we discuss over Zoom and in person.  The same pattern follows when we study digital game authoring tools, like Twine.

Role playing games follow a similar pattern, since their composition – people talking and relying on documents – is what we do in class in general.  I’ll try to maximize what each mode affords, even in little ways.  In-person students will create character name and identity cards out of paper, while online students customize their Zoom handles and backgrounds.  This will mean one thing when we do a short, D&D-like fantasy game and something different when we play a Reacting to the Past historical simulation.

Gaming class 2023 with both on-site and remote learners

Gaming class 2023 with both on-site and remote learners. Note how we pushed the table up to the screen, bringing that student among us.

 

A different approach is one I haven’t fully planned out yet, which I think of as “same theme, related games.”  That’s when there aren’t digital and analog versions of one game, so I pick two which are closely related.  I’d like to have the in-person students play the climate change game Daybreak, but am not sure of a good digital equivalent for the online students (and am open to suggestions! am trying out Half Earth and Terra Nil).

I’m also going to experiment with hybrid or blended play. We’ll start to look at wargames with the classic Ogre, a science fiction game where a gigantic, autonomous tank fights a swarm of human defenders.  I’m thinking of giving each in-person learner a group of units to organize, as if they are division commanders, then having the on-line students direct the titular Ogre. They can collaborate through Zoom chat and give me their instructions. This *might* work for this particular game, emphasizing the different nature of the two sides.

One hybrid practice I hope to be flexible and improvisational on is students building games and creating gamification plans, which is the climax of the seminar and to which I’ve allocated significant time during the last third of the class.  I hope for students to work with each other, including group projects, but also bouncing ideas off of each other and playtesting. They can make a wide range of games, from tabletop to digital to roleplaying (either a scenario for a preexisting ruleset or creating rules from scratch).

I hope virtual and on-site students can talk with each other and share plans. Physical materials are harder, but have possibilities. Remote learners can send us digital files to print (2d or 3d) for in-person class, and vice versa.  We should also be able to use cameras to share visuals of items and play.

…and that’s where things stand.  Class starts on Tuesday.  I’d like to hear your thoughts, dear readers.

(HyFlex image by Giulia Forsythe)

Posted in classes and teaching | 3 Comments

Starting my gaming in higher education seminar

Posted on January 9, 2025 by Bryan Alexander

Next week I’m launching my gaming in higher education seminar for Georgetown University’s Learning, Design, and Technology program. I am very excited, as ever, because it’s a great topic and one I’m eager to see my students engage.  I have many plans and ideas, which are about 99% set.  Here I’ll share those plans and ideas, partly for feedback, as well as to document some of my teaching practice in the open.

This is a class I’ve taught before.  The idea is to introduce students to the many ways higher education can use gaming, so that they can make informed decisions about the subject in their subsequent professional lives. For example, they might go on to be part of educational design teams in academia or elsewhere.

So, the way the class works is a mix of activities. They play example games and compare notes, both in person and through writing. They discuss scholarly readings. I briefly present on each type of game. Gradually they build up a final project, either an educational game or a detailed plan for a gamified class.

Bryan teaching tabletop gaming at Georgetown

A student and I trying out an early version of a tabletop game.

We begin by introducing tabletop, role playing, and computer games in order to give students a sense of the full field.  (I point to sports, but don’t address them much unless students do.) Next we dive into college and university uses, emphasizing teaching. We try out educational computer, tabletop, and role playing games, as well as look into gamification. Then we focus in on design aspects, building on our experience so far and trying some challenging example games. The last month of the class branches out (heh heh) into several topics, including storytelling, AI, and a topic students collaboratively determine.

I’m doing some new stuff with the class, because I can’t resist tinkering. I’ve cut readings down a bit and made more in-class time for game design. One class is really focused on design work, plus allows room for overflow content and student reflection on where we’ve come. I’m trying to allow more time for game play, because students needed it before.  The amount of technology is down a bit, because we didn’t get into each tool enough last time. I’m also reorganizing the seminar because it’s a fully hybrid/HyFlex one, with roughly one half of students online and one half remote; I’m writing a followup post on this.

I’ve also increased the climate change theme. There are more climate games and I plan on making it a more salient topic.

Here’s the syllabus.  I’ve delinked some links because they pointed to restricted files.

January 14, 2025 – Introductions and into the magic circle

  • The idea and practice of the class
  • Our individual experiences with gaming
  • Introduction to gaming (slides)
  • An introductory game: The Quiet Year
  • Technology: Twine and Steam (download to your class device)
  • writing in Canvas:
    1. student self-description character sheets
    2. what is your game persona’s D&D alignment? (This quiz might help)

January 21, 2025 – Tabletop gaming

January 28, 2025 – Role Playing Games – CLASS ONLINE

  • Introduction (slides)
  • Readings: Fuist, “The Agentic Imagination – Tabletop Role-playing Games as a Cultural Tool”; Garcia, “Privilege, Power, and D&D”
  • Games: we’ll use Year Zero for a system (copy this character sheet)
  • Design exercise: RPG for a higher education class

February 4, 2025 – Computer Gaming

February 11, 2025 –  Education and Gaming, I

***February 17: Analysis of one game due ; no class this week

Historical games, seen at the Strong National Museum of Play

Historical games, seen at the Strong National Museum of Play

February 25, 2025 – Education and Gaming, II – CLASS ONLINE

    • Reading: James Paul Gee, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (71-219).
    • Games:
    1. Computer games, science and humanities: Bondbreaker; Waterworks!
    2. Role playing games: Reacting to the Past
        • Your gamebook
        • Norwich churches
        • The city of Pistoia reacts
        • Avicenna on medieval medicine

(Spring break March 4, 2025)

March 11, 2025- Gamification

March 19, 2025 – Design for gaming and education, I

***March 21 – Pitch plan for final project due

March 26, 2025 – Design for gaming and education, II

April 2, 2025 – Storytelling and games

  • Storytelling introduction
  • Readings:  Gordon Civic Creativity and Role-Playing Games in Deliberative Process; Alexander, “Gaming: Storytelling on a Small Scale” and “Gaming: Storytelling on a Large Scale”, from The New Digital Storytelling, pp 97-127.
  • Games:
  • Collaborative game design time

April 9, 2025 – Design, explore, and catch up

  • Collaborative game design time
  • Bring a game for us to play
  • Reflect on what we’ve learned so far

April 16, 2025 – AI, gaming, and education

  • Collaborative game design time

April 23, 2025 – Student selected topic:  

April 30, 2025 – Final project demonstrations and presentations

  • Invite us to play and garner feedback

***May 6 – final project due

Coming up next: redesigning this class for HyFlex.

Posted in classes and teaching, gaming | 1 Comment

Celebrate the New Year with a happy Public Domain Day!

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Bryan Alexander

Happy New Year, everyone!  Welcome aboard, 2025!

Good-Bye_to_All_That coverAnd what better way to celebrate the new year then to recognize a whole slew of cultural objects just entered the public domain?  Yes, books, movies, and more from 1929 (and audio recordings from 1924) just left copyright as of this very day, according to United States law.  Other titles enter public domain from different years, depending on national laws (see below). So today is officially Public Domain Day.

Here are some examples of what’s now in the PD, assembled by, described by, and quoted from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

Books:

Movies:

  • A dozen more Mickey Mouse animations (including Mickey’s first talking appearance in The Karnival Kid)
  • The Cocoanuts, directed by Robert Florey and Joseph Santley (the first Marx Brothers feature film)
  • The Broadway Melody, directed by Harry Beaumont (winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture)
  • The Hollywood Revue of 1929, directed by Charles Reisner (featuring the song “Singin’ in the Rain”)
  • The Skeleton Dance, directed by Walt Disney and animated by Ub Iwerks (the first Silly Symphony short from Disney)
  • Blackmail, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (Hitchcock’s first sound film)
  • Hallelujah, directed by King Vidor (one of the first film from a major studio with an all African-American cast)
  • The Wild Party, directed by Dorothy Arzner (Clara Bow’s first “talkie”)
  • Welcome Danger, directed by Clyde Bruckman and Malcolm St. Clair (the first full-sound comedy starring Harold Lloyd)
  • On With the Show, directed by Alan Crosland (the first all-talking, all-color, feature-length film)
  • Pandora’s Box (Die Büchse der Pandora), directed by G.W. Pabst
  • Show Boat, directed by Harry A. Pollard (adaptation of the novel and musical)
  • The Black Watch, directed by John Ford (Ford’s first sound film)
  • Spite Marriage, directed by Edward Sedgwick and Buster Keaton (Keaton’s final silent feature)
  • Say It with Songs, directed by Lloyd Bacon (follow-up to The Jazz Singer and The Singing Fool)
  • Dynamite, directed by Cecil B. DeMille (DeMille’s first sound film)
  • Gold Diggers of Broadway, directed Roy Del Ruth

Music:

Audio recordings:

  • My Way’s Cloudy, recorded by Marian Anderson
  • Rhapsody in Blue, recorded by George Gershwin
  • Shreveport Stomp, recorded by Jelly Roll Morton
  • Lazy, recorded by The Georgians
  • Krooked Blues, recorded by King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band featuring Louis Armstrong
  • Deep Blue Sea Blues, recorded by Clara Smith
  • The Gouge of Armour Avenue, recorded by Fletcher Henderson and his Orchestra featuring Big Charlie Green
  • Mama’s Gone, Good Bye, recorded by Ray Miller and his Orchestra
  • It Had To Be You, recorded by the Isham Jones Orchestra and by Marion Harris
  • California Here I Come, recorded by Al Jolson

And two beloved characters:

  • E. C. Segar, Popeye (in “Gobs of Work” from the Thimble Theatre comic strip). Here’s the first appearance:

Popeye_first-appearance

  • Hergé (Georges Remi), Tintin (in “Les Aventures de Tintin” from the magazine Le Petit Vingtième)

Here’s another list of materials entering public domain in the US. And the same page lists cases for other countries, since copyright law can vary nationally.  For example, as the Public Domain Review describes,

  • works by people who died in 1954, for countries with a copyright term of “life plus 70 years” (e.g. UK, Russia, most of EU and South America);
  • works by people who died in 1974, for countries with a term of “life plus 50 years” (e.g. New Zealand, and most of Africa and Asia);

Now, because these materials are out of copyright, anyone can make use of them.  You can alter, remix, repost, or otherwise have at ’em.  There are even PD contests, like this game jam (“Gaming Like It’s 1929”) and the Internet Archive’s video remix contest.

Enjoy!

(Robert Graves book cover by “It is believed that the cover art can or could be obtained from Anchor., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6576431”)

 

Posted in copyright, economics, literature, movies, politics, storytelling, technology | 1 Comment

Looking back at 2024 from the bloghouse

Posted on December 30, 2024 by Bryan Alexander

I want to close out 2024 with a look back at the year on this blog.

You see, one of the rewards and pleasures of blogging is the way it expresses and illuminates emerging ideas. A blogger might have plans for what they’d like to do with their site over time, but life often intervenes.  New topics appear.  The process of writing yields emergent themes.  Over time some unexpected patterns become evident.

So let me look back on this blog over the past twelve months. I’ll try to be objective.

Subjectively, I thought I wrote a lot about climate change and politics, probably one post per week.

Objectively… according to site analytics, I published 68 posts, or a little more than one per week, about every five days.  I had been hoping for two per week, but the year was much busier than expected.

The posts which received the most attention (as in >1,000 views each) were, in descending order of clicks:

  1. On JD Vance and going after higher education
  2. One post on academic cuts, mergers, and closures (part of a lamentable series)
  3. One of several posts on what a second Trump administration might mean for higher education
  4. Another academic cut/merger/closure post
  5. Starting the Project 2025 online reading
  6. Yet another academic cut/merger/closure post

Two themes are obvious from this: politics and academic cuts.  I made a decision in 2023 to do more with the former, but thought I’d look more to climate change and the future of politics.  Trump’s resurgence shifted things, as I sought to help academics and general readers prepare for what is now happening, his second administration.  Along those lines we did an online, open, and extended reading of Project 2025.  Engagement with that dropped off steadily, unfortunately, at lease in terms of comments and clicks. Through the year I responded to some events, like the awful June presidential candidate debate.

Academic cuts are something I’ve been studying for more than a decade.  They play a vital role in the current book project, and I wanted to share that research.  People have been forwarding me news reports and telling their own stories about institutions closing, merging, cutting, or trying various forms of these strategies. Stories of campus financial problems have appeared through my email, social media DMs, and in person conversation.

On this blog I organize posts by top-level categories (you can see the list on the right menu bar, down the page a bit) and the number of posts in each is interesting in retrospect.  Politics definitely leads with 18 posts, or about one fourth of the lot.  Climate change came in second with 13, also confirming my intuition.  Enrollment and economics were salient as well at 9 apiece, followed by personal topics and horizon scanning with 7 each.

So a picture emerges of what I wrote here this year.  Politics and climate change dominated, and various research angles about higher education continued.

blog states for 2024 second half

A glimpse of the WordPress backend for this site. I switched analytics services 1/2way through the year, which made doing this post tricky.

I can cite more stats.  This blog received between 4,000 and 8500 visitors each month, with around 5,000 to 11,500 pageviews per month.  I’m not sure how this stands in terms of the overall blogosphere in 2024, but I’m glad to see that readers and I put the lie to the “blogging is dead” meme, at least on this site.

I’m more interested in how people used this site, especially when they wrote responses to posts.  Some of you know I deeply prize conversation throughout my work, from classes to the Future Trends Forum to presentations, and this blog is no exception.  Quantitatively, over the past year 360 comments appeared here, about one per day on average. I wrote around 25% of those comments, responding to yours, so that means around 270 responses from other folks.

Which posts received the greatest number of comments?  Here are some surprises.  My most commented-upon post by far wasn’t about politics or higher ed, but… food. Four years of a vegan diet received 62 responses, around 17% of the year’s total.  As a literature and culture person this shouldn’t surprise me, given how powerful food is in our lives. It was also a personal post, focused not on global food systems but on my own habits.  And it was a climate change post, because I turned vegan partly for that reason, and food systems play a major role in global warming.

Following that post-comment-behemoth were these posts, ranked and followed by the number of comments they elicited:

  1. Starting 2024 with all kinds of academic cuts 17
  2. Did the decade-long enrollment decline turn around? 14
  3. Turning 57 in the year 2024 12
  4. More academic cuts: May 2024 edition 11
  5. How will the FAFSA debacle impact colleges and universities this fall? 9
  6. When will the first college or university charge six figures per year? A 2024 update 9
  7. Reading Project 2025, part 1: the agenda and the start of a guidebook 9
  8. “The professors are the enemy”: J.D. Vance on higher education 9
  9. Getting ready to read Project 2025 in an open, online discussion 8
  10. Demographic update: American births continue to decline 7
  11. Reading Project 2025, part 4: overthrowing the Department of Education 7
  12. A climate fiction syllabus 7

This matches the intuition I mentioned at the start of this reflection, that the blog focused on politics and academic institutional cuts in 2024, including combinations of the two (FAFSA, JD Vance against faculty). Note other themes attracting writerly attention: enrollment and demographics, plus teaching.

What can I (and you, dear reader) take away from these datapoints and reflections?

I’m not sure what to make of this site being so focused on politics. I hope I did useful work, but I’m not sure of the real benefits.

The climate change focus is something I continue doing as a higher education futurist. The emerging and upcoming impacts of global warming on academia are vital, although the postsecondary world isn’t doing nearly enough to anticipate and respond.

The posts about enrollment, demographics, and institutional cuts make sense, given my research.  (This is one classical reason to blog: to share what one does, develop it further, to garner feedback) Overall, blogging 2024 reflected major themes in my work.

Looking ahead, I plan to continue posting about higher education cuts and climate change.  The former seems likely to occur, to be meaningful, and to shape the future of higher ed. The latter is, well, ditto.

I might keeping writing about politics – national politics, that is. I hope to make time for global geopolitics, if I have anything to add to the discourse. For American national politics, though… in 2024 I wrote as a futurist, aiming to help people think about and plan for something which seemed likely to occur.  Now that it (a new Trump administration) is happening, I’m not sure what futurist perspective would be useful here – a look at possibilities for the next four years? Additionally, if the new government and its supporters decide to surveil for criticism and punish writers for doing so, blogging the subject might become risky.

I’m still surprised by the vegan food post.  I’ve toyed with the idea of spinning off a blog on vegan eating and cooking, but there are already plenty and I don’t have the time.

Depending on how several projects turn out, I might write more about gaming, technology, and the broader future.

Thank you, readers, for reading and responding.  What did you make of this site in 2024?

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